As a rule, a ventilation system has a minimum service life of 20 years and pays for itself within this time, in modern buildings usually within the first decade of use.
When does a home ventilation system pay off?
What is the service life of a domestic ventilation system?
A few years ago, TZWL published a report entitled “Ventilation system duct inspection”, which shows the condition of a ventilation system installed in 1984. There are a large number of systems that have been in operation for over 25 years. The condition of the air ducts is also remarkably good after this long period of operation.
In our opinion, a minimum service life of 20 years can therefore be assumed.
When does a ventilation system pay for itself?
The health and living comfort aspects of a ventilation system cannot be expressed in figures. The health and well-being benefits are assessed individually by each person.
A purely economic consideration of the benefits of a ventilation system would therefore be too one-sided an approach.
Without taking the aforementioned aspects into account, amortization periods for ventilation systems of between 10 and 40 years can be expected.
Individual user behavior in practice also has a considerable influence on the actual consumption values for heating buildings.
The consumption data shown for the individual variants in the book “Welche Heizung braucht das Haus?” (Rolf Schmidt, Fraunhofer IRB-Verlag, 3rd updated edition, see section 5) show that domestic ventilation systems with heat exchangers reduce the energy consumption of the example house by approx. 15 %. If heat pumps are used, consumption is even reduced by up to 70 % or more. Annual energy costs can thus be reduced by around half.
Without subsidies, however, the payback periods can be as long as 20 to 40 years. The reasons for this include the additional costs and taxes included in our electricity prices.